NYRSF Issue 329 Editorial: This Broken Year

This is the January 2016 issue. I was somewhat looking forward to taking a little bow for reaching my 20th anniversary on the NYRSF staff, but then January happened.

The body blow was David Hartwell dying suddenly. On January 19, David was performing a completely routine task—carrying a barristers bookshelf down a flight of stairs in one of the two buildings he shared in Westport, New York, with Kathryn Cramer and his family. He owned a lot of bookcases; those many lovely barristers shelves were a visual highlight of the living room at Stately Hartwell Manor in Pleasantville for decades.

He fell, and a blood vessel burst in his brain; the order is unknowable and doesn’t matter. He never regained consciousness, was never going to regain consciousness, and then he was gone.

The kindness and knowledge David carried around cannot be replaced.

That horror was by far the largest of January’s shocks, but the whole month was a series of annoyances, sorrows, obstacles, and setbacks one after another. At Valentine’s Castle, the home I share with Arthur and Bernadette, we had severe plumbing problems requiring days of work and thousands of dollars and a burned-out electrical socket. One of our pets went through a months-long slow and painful decline that ended in euthanasia.

Several landmark artists whose work was particularly important to me died—Alan Rickman, Paul Kantner, and, particularly devastating, David Bowie, whose music and fully lived life had been a foundation of my own worldview from a very early age. (The first notice I saw of Bowie’s death was on Twitter; the user @shutupmikeginn said, “I loved David Bowie because you knew if it was OK for him to be David Bowie it was just fine to be yourself”, and that is all the truth.)

The month simply would not stop. Marvin Minsky, whom I met at the wedding of his daughter Margaret to one of my closest friends in high school, died. New York caught the edge of a very sharply demarcated snowstorm (it dropped 20” on Yonkers, 26” in Manhattan, 30” in parts of Queens, and less than 10” in White Plains, a span of 20 miles); that was the very day when we had planned to start the editorial Work Weekend for the January issue, which contributed greatly to our present delay. A gay friend was fired from his tenured professorship for an inappropriate action, in a college system where heterosexual professors had committed worse offenses in greater quantities to receive only minor rebukes.

David’s day-to-day and month-to-month involvement in NYRSF had, by design, been significantly reduced when we moved to electronic-first publishing, one thing taken off of his far-too-full plate. We will carry on, because we can and because we should. Our photos this issue are shots David took at the First Night festival in Saratoga Springs highlighting his love for music, a part of his life that I know I didn’t pay enough attention to.

Our next issue, cover-dated February, will be an extra-length memorial to David with contributions from all throughout David’s immense network of family, friends, fans, collaborators, clients, and fellow travelers. Thanks to the generosity of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, printed copies will be available for all attendees of their 2016 Conference. Electronic copies will be available free in perpetuity through our kind publishing partners at Weightless Books (and will not count against your subscription). Out of courtesy to the IAFA, the electronic edition will be released on March 16, the first day of the ICFA. See you then. And in the meanwhile, be kind and take care of yourselves.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors